Tintagel Read Free Page B

center of a circled area that was tiled in the form of a Tibetian mandala—lines, circles, and stars, pointing to an illuminated center that itself was a five-pointed star. Lanier began his inward concentration.
    In the other room, Charlie Gilbert drank himself silly, as the console silently transmitted the crystalline sonic-wafer of Paul Ben-Haim's work into the transceiver implanted in Lanier's right earlobe. Lanier didn't want Charlie himself to succumb to the Syndrome, knowing full well what grief, anxiety, and twelve-year-old Scotch could do. So he played the piece silently. He concentrated on emptying his mind of all thoughts, all images, letting it fill with the muted tones of the second movement of the orchestral suite.
    Even through the soundproofed walls, Charlie felt the sudden collapse of air as Francis Lanier vanished. He swallowed a double shot in one easy motion, thinking of Christy—wherever she was.
    What experts there were at the time said that Liu Shan's Syndrome was many things, but no one had a firm grasp on what it actually did to the nervous system. For it seemed that the Syndrome affected more than just the body.
    The eighteen hundred known Stalkers privately insisted to the government authorities that the answer would lie in a total rethinking of Western man's attitude toward science.
    Even though for thousands of years sages and wise men of the East had been saying it, it wasn't until the Unified Field Theory, once begun by Einstein himself, was validated in the previous century that a simple fact had become known. Reality was nothing more than a certain series of vibrations to which every person on the planet was attuned. Everything is energy, there is no such thing as matter: it all reveals itself in frequencies of vibrations only the most sensitive can see or feel.
    And the mystics—the walis , the sadgurus —say our world is literally crisscrossed with other worlds beyond our normal perceptions, some of which we enter when we sleep, some of which we enter when we die. There are higher worlds of higher beings, lower worlds of lower beings. Only the saints of the world religions have had access to them.
    Until now. Until one day in the highlands of China, a man named Liu Shan, a renegade popularly associated with the People's Democratic Revolutionary Front, developed an airborne bacterium that had a lifespan of twenty days, which would merely heighten the neurosis of anyone who inhaled or ingested any of the culture. He and some colleagues of his, it is said, in an attempt to undermine the government of Peking, turned the bacterium loose, to blow first over southeastern Asia, then to Japan, home of the world's largest suicide rate. Then on to America, and eventually Europe. It would die down before reaching the western stretches of the Gobi Desert. The People's Democratic Revolutionary Front would survive, unaffected, to create a new China, and a new world. Or so it is said.
    Everyone—including Lanier, Charlie Gilbert, and Christy Cooper—became quite familiar with Liu Shan's infamous disease. And they soon realized its implications when they tried to recall a classic blues song, or an old Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys favorite. These were now outlawed because old-style country western and blues appealed to the strongest, deepest emotions. The Syndrome fed off those pits of despair. For what happened came as much as a surprise to the revolutionary Chinese as it did to the health authorities world over: the bacterium mutated horribly into a more powerful strain when it mixed and breeded rather plentifully with the industrial air-pollutants over southern Japan. No one could foresee the consequences of such an accident.
    In Kyoto, only a few days after the disease was flown into the upper troposphere in Chinese "weather" balloons, the Syndrome manifested itself as thousands of individuals, watching a particularly sad and musical show of local historic significance on their television sets,